Opinions of a Professional Reader

John Rebus, homicide specialist with the Edinburgh police, has retired twice already but he just can’t stop being a cop. This time, he’s called in to act as a consultant by DI Siobhan Clarke, once his protégé, now an accomplished detective in her own right. The thing is, he was for decades the nemesis of Gerald Morris Cafferty, local crime lord, and the two men, while never friends, have reached a sort of rapprochement in retirement.

This author is new to me, though he appears to have done half a dozen previous novels. Matt Jones is an LAPD detective newly assigned to Robbery/Homicide — the gold ring for Los Angeles cops — and he’s supposed to be meeting his best friend and mentor on the force for a celebratory supper when he’s called to a murder scene down the block from the restaurant — which turns out to be his friend, dead in a hail of large-caliber lead, apparently a victim of a robber the media calls the Three-Piece Bandit.

Crais is one of the more reliable writers of crime fiction around, both in his handful of independent novels and in the sixteen books featuring Los Angeles private investigator Elvis Cole and his friend and partner, Joe Pike. Cole is a professional, mostly doing work for attorneys, much of it very routine, but that’s what pays the bills.

Among science fiction sub-genres, I’m a great fan of time-travel stories — and yet I somehow missed this first volume of an outstanding trilogy for more than a decade after its publication. How did I never hear of it or read a review? Because it certainly received a good deal of well-deserved attention among the reviewers. God only knows. But I’ve read all three volumes more than once in the thirty years since.

It’s been a year now since Fran Hunter died, and while Inspector Jimmy Perez will never, ever forget her, he has at least returned to the world of the living and resumed his duties running the Shetland Islands’ small police force. This time, the story involves a party of six young professionals from London, three couples, who are visiting Unst, the northernmost island of the Shetlands — the most northerly community in the UK, in fact, a place where the sun never sets in midsummer.

This is the second novel featuring Tokyo homicide detective Kusanagi and his physicist friend, Yukawa, who helps out the police with their more technical mysteries and puzzles, and who has become known to the cops as “Detective Galileo.” The mystery this time centers on the death by arsenic poisoning in his own kitchen of Yoshitoka Mashiba, a corporate CEO.

This final volume of the “Interesting Times” trilogy is definitely a rouser. At the end of the previous installment, Sally Rain, who caused most of the trouble (but with the best of intentions), had been exiled to The Island indefinitely by the ancient little girl Artemis,

At the end of the first volume, Interesting Times, Oliver Jones had traded in his dull life as a stock analyst for a sometimes too-exciting job with the Araneae Group that involves carrying firearms and taking on problems ranging from free-range vampires to alternate Earths.

Oliver Jones is a financial analyst for a small San Francisco hedge fund and his life is a succession of gray, dull days. He has acquaintancances but no friends, no love life, no hobbies. He doesn’t even dream.

To my mind, Atwood is one of the two or three greatest living writers in English. In each of her novels and short stories, what she has to say is always worth hearing. And the way in which she says it will hold your attention, make you think, and make you laugh. She’s completely accessible, too, not abstract and Joycean. And this doesn’t happen by accident, as her expert critical essays make clear. I always pick up Atwood’s latest book with pleasurable anticipation, and I’ve never been disappointed.

Where Does This Stuff Come From?

As a retired public librarian (large system in a large Southern city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of others for 50 years now. Starting in 1999, I began posting my reviews to a personal website, but in 2009, I discovered Wordpress & shifted my reviewing jones to a blog.

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What Do I Read?

What do you have? My tastes in reading are extremely eclectic and I seldom follow a plan. My "to read" list is lengthy and always growing; it presently runs to 50+ pages. Sometimes I'll pick up a book on the strength of a favorable review. Sometimes I simply browse the "New Books" section at the library. Sometimes I discover a series of novels and read the whole sequence, one volume after another. I read a great deal of science fiction, cookbooks, mysteries, archaeology, Dickens, art books, historical novels, architecture, children's as well as YA books, language and grammar, chick-lit, Civil War history, graphic novels, Terry Pratchett, experimental literature, travel books, books about books and reading -- almost anything you can think of (with the exceptions of sports books and western novels, which simply bore me).

A Note about Reviews from the More Distant Past

Since books never go out of date, all the pages below are quarterly cumulations of my past book reviews (with the number of reviews on each page indicated). You can browse or you can find specific authors or titles (or any other word or phrase) through the search box above. (Categories and tags, unfortunately, cannot be attached to pages.)